iPhone4S vs. iPhone5

[Dan Danknick]

I don't expect the Nordic engineers to know this answer but I'd like to hear from other devs out in BLE land...

Have any of you encountered truly horrible BLE PHY-level connectivity on the iPhone5? For the past few months I've done all of my work on a 4S and it's been rock solid. Same apps running on a 5 (even LightBlue and BTLExplorer) exhibit frequent drops. This seems backward to me; I'd expect the BT hardware to improve as the phones improve. Did Apple screw up antenna sharing with WiFi?

I - and I'm sure many other nRF devs - would appreciate any and all experience you've had whether it correlates to mine or not.

Thank you in advance, Dan

[Nathan]

Hi Dan,

I've done extensive testing on a device we are developing, and we have absolutely got the same issue. The Iphone 5 performs much worse than the 4S. The 6 is better than the 5. Even the examples such as ble_hrs etc experience drops (whether compiled in keil or eclipse, or even after services are stripped out), particularly with a failure to make the initial connection. The problem seems to get worse the more the device is doing i.e. more timer interrupts and high frequency tasks.

Edit: using nrf51822 chip on custom board, s110 soft device 7.1, SDK 6.1.

To the developer community, is there some implementation to avoid this?

• Nathan